Almost every New Zealand town has one and some have several, reflecting a historical readiness for us to get involved in other people’s conflicts: the war memorial.
This is a story about a war memorial in a small historic town, these days a pit stop on State Highway 1, an hour’s drive south of Auckland. It is a memorial that, with its twin further upriver, might be the most ambiguous and history-laden in Aotearoa.
The Mercer war memorial embodies the Land Wars – once known as the “Māori Wars” and now called the New Zealand Wars by modern historians, fully aware of how one-sided they were. Yet it is dedicated to memorialising those who served and died in World War I, the Great War that came four decades later.
Towns and cities around the country have sometimes beautiful, often ugly, frequently workmanlike and even arguably inappropriate commemorations of the New Zealand Wars, the South African (Boer) War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam. We have, or had, streets named after Lord Kitchener, battles in the Crimean War – Inkerman, Balaclava – and Pākehā soldiers including Cameron and Von Tempsky (although Von Tempsky St in Hamilton was changed to Putikitiki St two years ago).
“[These memorials] were simply part of the accepted fabric of New Zealand life,” historian Jock Phillips writes in To the Memory, a survey of the idea and execution of New Zealand war memorials. “Every town or village had one, and we passed by the simple obelisks in town centres or the soldier statues in municipal parks without stopping to examine them. They were part of our world, like football fields or lampposts or supermarkets.”
Mercer’s is a particularly odd – even slightly spooky – memorial, laden with history. It is built from what was once an advanced weapon of a superpower.
Over more than a century, it has accreted meaning, memory, and significance – an almost geological record of history. It is a powerful statement from the Waikato Wars, the loss and service of young men from the Mercer region in WWI, and the experience of Māori.
A statue of a WWI soldier stands atop what looks like a military pillbox with the word “Mercer” on his rear. On the iron turret, plaques commemorate the dead from that war as well as the men – all seemingly Pākehā names – from the area who served.
So far so normal. Except, the pillbox is not quite what it seems. Rather, it is one of two turrets from a state-of-the-art warship, the Pioneer. The Pioneer was among the first naval ships of colonial-era New Zealand, sailing not to defend coastline in WWI, but against Māori in the Waikato Wars in the 1860s.
It was designed to attack Māori pā from the Waikato River. Its arsenal included hoses to spray boiling water from the ship’s boilers over approaching waka. Inside the turrets – said to be the first revolving gun enclosures on a ship – were Atkinson guns, the finest artillery of their era.
They could, and did, fire shells into Māori pā – especially Rangiriri – as Governor George Grey pressed on with his single-minded and bloody war into the Waikato with troops led by Lieutenant-General Duncan Cameron.
Grey commissioned a New South Wales shipyard to build the Pioneer in 1863 – a shallow-draft, rear-paddle steamer designed specifically for the Waikato campaign. An Onehunga metal works built the turrets, one forward and one aft. The Pioneer was the best the British Empire could offer. It was a super weapon sent by what was then a superpower against an indigenous people.
Before its incarnation as a war memorial, the detached Mercer turret was a jail, a smokehouse, and an explosives store. One plaque attached to it today corrects an error on another: one says the Pioneer was built in 1873 for “the Māori War” and another corrects that to 1863 and calls them “Land Wars”.
Yet another says: “To commemorate the memory of the fallen in the conflicts which have made this area a place of peace.”
At its unveiling in 1922, the Franklin Times reported: “On top of this turret commemorating the Maori [sic] war stands a figure of a soldier symbolical of the Great War … Mercer has succeeded in linking the old and the new in her war memorial and her monument will be especially interesting to the generations yet to come.”
“Interesting” is perhaps understating the memorial’s meaning today. For many Māori, it’s a raised middle finger to the Māori history of the Waikato. The Mercer turret faces the site of Te Paina Pā, the pā of Te Puea Hērangi who led the fight against Tainui conscription in World War I.
The second turret, 50km further south in Ngāruawāhia, is on the site of the pā of the first Māori King, Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, erased by the colonial forces. It is on a contested triangle where the Waipā River joins the Waikato, known as The Point or Te Huinga o Ngaa Wai (the meeting/gathering of the waters) now managed jointly by Waikato District Council and Tainui.
Sculptor Brett Graham (Ngāti Korokī Kahukura, Tainui) grew up knowing the history of the turrets and the war from his father, artist Fred Graham. Brett Graham has brought the ambiguity and significance of the turrets to an ambitious work, O’Pioneer, a life-sized representation first exhibited at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth. The wood and plaster work is part of his 2020 Tai MoTaana Tai Tangata series.
Like the real turrets, the work has layers of meaning – a white exterior reminiscent of Victorian pressed-metal ceilings and the “royal” icing on his parents’ wedding cake, the icing itself named for Queen Victoria’s own wedding cake.
An accompanying work refers to Victoria’s mourning veil and is a large black shroud, or purutapu pōuriuri, embroidered with the insignia of the colonial regiments Grey sent to invade Waikato. Both works are designed to make the viewer uncomfortable with the juxtapositions.
“Ambiguity is your friend when you’re an artist,” says Graham. “That’s how you create unease – looking like something familiar, giving you the warm fuzzies, and in actual fact, you’re subverting that.
“Behind those objects of civility are incredible acts of violence.”
Signs of the times
There is no explanatory sign at the Mercer memorial to describe any deeper meaning. Both turrets cry out for a more detailed explanation of the history behind them and why they are where they are and the complex and ambiguous history that they represent.
Some local Māori would like to see the memorial moved: the Queen’s Redoubt at Pōkeno, the British headquarters in the Waikato War, has been suggested for relocation. That may deal with the Pioneer connection but not the way the memorial honours the local WWI dead. It remains a poignant remembrance of those men, many of whose descendants still live in the area.
“This is a debate that’s happening around the world,” says historian Vincent O’Malley, who has written highly regarded books on the Waikato and New Zealand wars. “Maybe you leave the statue in situ and you erect some information panels in front of it that describes the person who is celebrated and contextualises their life from the perspective of today.
“And that provides the missing context and the explanation for that. I do think often that is a good option worth exploring.”
The decision, he says, is for locals to take. (Waikato District Council says it has no current plans to add more information but is aware of consultation on the idea of relocating the Mercer turret to Queen’s Redoubt).
Brett Graham is open to better explanations about their true history but sees the turrets, in particular Mercer’s, as much rawer symbols.
“I think it’s just a blatant reminder that we [Waikato Māori] were not divided. And that people were crushed and colonised. There’s a recognition that it is basically there to celebrate that people were subjugated.
“It’s a reminder of who won that war, a continual reminder.”
Consigned to history
Today known as State Highway 1, the Great South Road – its colonial name – slices through Mercer, itself named for Captain Henry Mercer, who was killed in the attack on the Rangiriri pā in 1863. Grey built the road for the war and the Waikato River was a critical conduit.
By the time Lord Jellicoe, the governor-general, dedicated the Mercer memorial in 1922, the war against Māori was being pushed into history. Instead, we celebrated the sacrifice and national coming of age in WWI and the now rather contested idea of amicable – even world-leading – race relations, building a new nation together as Kiwis, a label first widely used for our troops in the Great War.
“The top portion was a sign of the splendid and loyal co-operation of the great Maori [sic] race with the British race during the war,” the NZ Herald reported Jellicoe as saying. The turret “brought to mind the chivalry which distinguished the fighting in the Maori war”.
The Franklin Times recorded “a Maori wahine of some huge dimensions” who waved a scarf and called “Haremai, haremai” [sic] during the dedication. Whether it was plaintive or more enthusiastic was not recorded.
Four years later, the second Pioneer turret was dedicated as a memorial in Ngāruawāhia. Auckland locations had been proposed but Ngāruawāhia was chosen for the “unusually interesting relic of a stirring period” (the Herald), the turret recalling “the almost-forgotten” river warfare of the Waikato campaign (the Dominion).
Phillips has written that the memorials “were deliberate and often controversial acts of propaganda and social control”. Yet, they were also exuberant and sometimes powerful memorials to service and loss and to a new nationhood. He calls Anzac Day “the closest thing we have to a ceremony of nationalism”.
As we grapple with some of the modern attempts to reinterpret or rethink our history as a colony with an indigenous people (and a foundational treaty), the Mercer and Ngāruawāhia memorials symbolise the complex and layered history of the past 200 years – not to mention the wish of families to honour those who served and who died.
Each memorial embodies our attempts over time to define our history. Each generation needs to reprocess it. Some memorials are forgotten. The Brett Graham artworks force us to think about past and present and to embrace the challenges that presents.
“The New Zealand that we grew up in: we were supposed to whitewash – excuse the pun – all of that history for the sake of having the best race relations,” says Graham. “Of course, it all came to a head with that [1981] Springbok tour, and we saw things weren’t quite as right, or white, as we thought they were.”
One intriguing aspect of the Pioneer turret memorials and many others in New Zealand is the congruence with Confederate memorials that appeared in the southern US states about the same time – America’s Civil War more or less coincided with the Waikato War.
“A lot of these memorials are erected in the early-20th century at the exact same period a lot of Confederate memorials were erected in the United States,” says O’Malley.
In the past decade, many of the Confederate statues have been removed (usually by local authorities, sometimes illegally) as they are seen as, and were mostly intended as, statements of what was lost in the Confederacy and of the foundational sin of slavery at the heart of the Civil War.
O’Malley is certainly not arguing that the New Zealand memorials carry anything like that message or threat but says they “reflect the particular values and priorities of the people who erected them at that time, as any monument or memorial would”.
He stresses that does not mean the turrets were put up for “malignant reasons”. They are artefacts of their time and of the attitudes of their time. While Pākehā celebrated the new nation and its race relations, Māori “were privately grieving”.